The epilogue briefly considers Ovid’s exile poetry from an environmental and place-based perspective. Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetry does not need to rely on a positive attachment to a local land. His exile poetry is about and is marked by place, shaped by the location from which Ovid is estranged and the location in which he writes. Moreover, local place matters to Ovid as a particular more-than-human environment. Tomis is represented as an environment with its own specific geography, climate, and ecologies. Ovid further explores ecological themes by emphasizing the physical effects Tomis has on his body, through motifs of cold and sickness. The epilogue also uses Ovid’s exilic work to clarify the theoretical foundations of the environmental poetics identified in Vergil and Horace. Through his provocative play with intertextuality and fictionality, Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetics can rely not on realistic description or extratextual reference, but rather on the poetic imagination.

The introductory chapter to this study of Propertius 4 as a collection composed in the wake of Virgil’s death begins by highlighting some of the more obvious ways in which the elegist advertises his allusive engagement with the Eclogues, Georgics and, in particular, the Aeneid, and how the troping of this engagement as hospitality suggests a relationship that might be cooperative or antagonistic. From there it looks back to the only two Propertian elegies in which the name Vergilius features – 1.8 (ostensibly referring to the Pleiades constellation but, it is argued, punningly invoking the poet) and 2.34 (in a review of Virgil’s career to date), each constructing a relationship between elegiac and epic poetics that, as later chapters show, will be revisited in Book 4. After these preliminary case-studies the Introduction presents a history of approaches to poetic memory by way of a survey of the scholarly responses mobilized by Propertius 4 as a Virgilianizing collection. These approaches are then tested in the laboratory of elegy 4.9, a Virgilio-Propertian diptych on Hercules which, it is argued, is programmatic for allusion and intertextuality as enacted in this collection.

These concluding remarks offer a sideways look at some issues raised by this book, taking their cue from the surviving iconography of the monument at the centre of Propertius 4 – the Temple of Palatine Apollo – to address the ideological implications of the different handling by Propertius and Virgil of Augustan mythmaking. Ultimately the many traces of Virgilian sensibility in Propertius, and of Propertian sensibility in Virgil, are easier to identify than to interpret. Yet Propertius’ obsessive Virgilian intertextuality (here distilled into a multi-part typology), while showing that the elegist is haunted by his epic confrère, is also an exercise of control that transcends generic anxiety to recognize and enact Virgil’s status as a classic of the Roman literary canon. Propertius’ Virgilian intertextuality, extending as it does to structural and stichometric parallels, may also have implications for the textual criticism of both authors, at least insofar as a Virgilian reading of Book 4 obtains. These last reflections find their way to a comparison with Shostakowich’s Fourteenth Symphony, where uncanny thematic, political and structual parallels with Propertius 4 give pause for thought.

A great deal of figurative decoration on Greek painted pottery relates to mythology. But what made particular painters choose to paint particular scenes at particular times? This chapter assembles the evidence for what was painted on Athenian painted pottery from the seventh to the fourth century, showing how different scenes peaked in popularity at different periods, and how although some scenes were perennial favourites, others attracted interest only briefly. The chapter then explores the implications of the patterns both for changing degrees of engagement with one particular set of texts, the Homeric epics, and for the way in which changing values affected the myths, and the literary instantiations of those myths, that were in vogue at any one time. While the questions of what it is to be human, how men relate to women, and how to behave at a party are of lasting interest to users of pottery, engaging with issues of divine power is popular in the sixth century, with issues of sexual relations and extreme situations arising from war popular around 500, and issues about decision-making as popular in the fifth century.

This chapter examines some of the specific methodological challenges of reading dramatic fragments intertextually. It also explores some broader aspects of intertextuality, literary culture, readership, orality, and memory in relation to Greek drama in general. It begins by noting the tendency of commentators and critics to use the formula ‘cf.’ when identifying any sort of similarity between fragmentary texts (or between fragmentary texts and extant ones). But ‘cf.’ on its own is inadequate as an interpretative strategy. This chapter investigates what types of textual relationship are actually being signified by ‘cf.’, and whether it is always possible to know for certain. It also asks to what extent the poor state of the evidence hampers our understanding of textual relations between fragmentary plays, and it raises the problem of how to discern which text is responding to which. These questions are addressed by looking in detail at a number of case studies from works by Aeschylus, Phrynichus, Glaucus, Ion, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

This chapter argues for and interprets allusions to the invocation before the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484-93) in Ibycus’ ’Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ’Plataea Elegy’. It then considers these four poems together as a unique case study for the early reception of Homer. For no other passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey can we trace an equally extensive afterlife in early Greek lyric. The author argues that the unusual prominence of the narrator’s personality and the exceptionally emphatic claim to objective truth in Il. 2.484–93 made these lines a privileged point of reference for subsequent explorations of the nature of poetic authority.

Inscribed metrical texts are often marginalised in the study of archaic and classical poetics. This chapter integrates examples from c. 725 to c. 450 BCE with wider practices of intertextuality, where epigrams both share techniques with other kinds of literature and have some distinctive modes of signification. Early epigrams frequently use formulas to demonstrate the adherence of a dedication or funeral to traditional norms. The apparent decline in use of glaukopis on the Acropolis after 550 BCE suggests that these formulas were not just metrically convenient: semantics mattered. Epigrams also replicate formulaic phrases from both elegy and epic with their traditional connotations intact; such connotations enrich our understanding of Phrasicleia’s epitaph (CEG 24), and of ancient epigrammatists’ conceptualisation of the relationship between oral and inscribed poetry. Inscriptions, unlike other texts, also invited interpretation against monuments situated nearby. Early dialogues of this type tend to be cooperative rather than polemical. Examples discussed include Onatas’ signatures at Olympia, the tripods at the Theban Hismenion described by Herodotus, and the relationship of the Eion herms to CEG 2–3.

How much continuity was there in the allusive practices of the ancient world? This chapter explores this question here by considering the early Greek precedent for the so-called ‘Alexandrian footnote’, a device often regarded as one of the most learned and bookish in a Roman poet’s allusive arsenal. Ever since Stephen Hinds opened his foundational Allusion and Intertext with this device, it has been considered the preserve of Hellenistic and Roman scholar-poets. This chapter, however, argues that we should back-date the phenomenon all the way to the archaic age. By considering a range of illustrative examples from epic (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod), lyric (Sappho, Pindar, Simonides), and tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides, Theodectes), it demonstrates that the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.

One of the poetic features of Isaiah is its intertextuality. The authors of the later portions of the book worked with attention to the existing Isaianic texts, so that the book as a whole is woven together by common themes and vocabulary. Furthermore, the book is full of allusions to other biblical books, and was itself eventually a touchstone for later biblical authors. (Sometimes it is even uncertain which text came first!) Hyun Chul Paul Kim, in “Isaiah in Intertextual Perspective,” analyzes the book at each of these levels, and then looks forward to “points of intersectionality” between Isaiah and the modern world.

This chapter examines how Pindar and Bacchylides make use of early epic (esp. Homer) in their victory odes, from an explicitly ’intertextualist’ perspective. It discusses (inter alia) the meaning of ’Homer’ in the fifth century BC to the earliest audiences of Pindar and Bacchylides and adverts to the complexity and multiplicity of the audiences of their victory odes. It argues furthermore for the critical importance and benefits of intertextual analysis of Pindar and Bacchylides, especially the ways in which interaction with texts such as those of archaic epic should prompt a wider openness to intertextual investigation of victory odes.

The first section of this introduction sets the scene for the volume as a whole by briefly considering the history of intertextuality within modern classical scholarship, both Latin and Greek, and then highlighting the special methodological and historical challenges that attend on comparative approaches to early Greek literature. As scholars increasingly agree on the need to read early Greek literature in a comparative way, it is argued, this only makes more urgent the question of how best to do so. The second section of the introduction highlights some of the core methodological, historical, and literary preoccupations of this book by exploring in chronological order two contrastive and complementary case studies from early elegy, one from Tyrtaeus and one from Simonides. Rather than providing a set of definitive answers about how these texts relate to epic tradition and/or particular epics, this section aims to give a sense of the sort of questions at stake in the following chapters. The introduction then concludes by summarising each of those chapters and highlighting interconnections between them.

As scholars look increasingly for the traces of intertextuality and allusion in early Greek poetry, Homer remains the prime focus of interest, and the relationship between the Iliad and Odyssey especially so. This chapter suggests that, though direct allusion between texts should not be ruled out a priori, an intertextual dynamic which stems from the traditionality of the texts is a more reliable and rewarding first interpretative step. The discussion reviews two examples which have served as important planks in the case that the Odyssey explicitly refers to the Iliad, and finds wanting the allusive arguments normally used to make that case, before suggesting a more methodologically and historically sound form of interaction. Interpretation, meaning, and appreciation all remain possible, and are indeed much richer in their appreciation of the poetry.

How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

It is well known that Virgil’s reference to the ‘woods of Molorcus’ in the prooemium of Georgics 3, echoing Callimachus’ poem staging this otherwise unknown figure in his Victoria Berenices, enables the Roman poet to signpost his reappropriation of the Alexandrian epinicion within the loaded context of the celebration of Octavian’s victory over Egypt. In line with this interpretation, this chapter focuses more closely on Molorcus himself and his (devastated) land as a significant theme in its own right. By alluding to the story of this impoverished farmer unable to perform his ‘georgic’ tasks in a poem centred on the countryman’s labour, Virgil retroactively constructs his Callimachean model as a failure to live according to the main precepts of his didactic poem, thus making the land of Molorcus appear as an anti-type of Octavian’s idealised rural Italy. Moreover, this failure is connected to the havoc created by a ‘terrible lion’ whose slaying by Heracles readily offers an image of the princeps’ victory over his foes, thus making the poor farmer’s land a contrasting prefiguration of the hoped-for Augustan space.

This chapter approaches the problem of the poem's audience vis-à-vis the relational process of reading whereby one poem opens windows onto another, either through intertextual references and allusions or through the reader's own cognitive connections. The chapter expands on this relational ontology of poems to argue that in the act of reading there is no single poem; instead, a universal named “poetry” is extracted from the particularity of the so-called “single” poem. The chapter focuses on the poet-reader as a specific category of audience and, in order to read the transnational travel of poems, it considers the reception of T. S. Eliot in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and of the generation of Bengali poets who, after Tagore, both translate Eliot and echo him in their own poems. If Tagore is dissident in his use of Eliot's poetry as a counter-frame, the younger Samar Sen records a supportive intertextual presence of Eliot, while Bishnu Dey's translation of Eliot foregrounds a self-reflexivity of the poem that he imports into Eliot's text. These close readings affirm the chapter's central critique of the autonomous single poem in the pluralistic reading process.